


The Age of Exploration

by Silex



Category: Original Work
Genre: Exploration, Gen, History, Mars, Robots, Science Fiction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-26
Updated: 2019-07-26
Packaged: 2020-07-20 11:42:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,993
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19991593
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Silex/pseuds/Silex
Summary: Mars has been colonized long enough that there are those living on it who have never set foot on Earth and nostalgia for the past is becoming a trend, yet Mars has its own rich history. Kim is part of a team of amateur historians looking to bring that past to the colonies of Mars to that they might appreciate it.





	The Age of Exploration

**Author's Note:**

  * For [DesertVixen](https://archiveofourown.org/users/DesertVixen/gifts).



Cresting the small rise Kim checked the GPS and wondered if this was what it was like hundreds of years ago when explorers were charting the last frontier on Earth, mapping the depths of the oceans and finding wrecks from the First Age of Exploration.

Now she was part of a small salvage team dedicated to doing the same with pieces of the Second Age of Exploration, which they were arguably still in the middle of. Schoolchildren waited with bated breath for the latest images from the little autonomous drones traveling over Europa the same way children hundreds of years ago must have waited for transmissions from the rovers that traveled across the surface of Mars.

Like those ancient wrecks deep below the seas of Earth, it was getting to the site that was the difficult part. The rovers and other pieces of history that Kim and the team she was a part of sought out were all in known locations, it was getting to them that took time and effort. Perseverance Valley was a three day skimmer ride from the nearest colony dome and now she and the others were walking transects across the valley to find the rover they’d come to find.

Having rough coordinates of where _Opportunity_ had sent its last transmission from was one thing, and the old pictures helped a lot, but being on the ground made all the difference in the worlds. The team looking for the Mars 3 lander had driven by it in their skimmer several times before finding it within fifteen minutes of getting out to search on foot. It was a story that Kim kept in mind as she searched the area, looking for any sign of the old rover.

Several meters away October 12, the only nonhuman member of the team, a construction robot named for the day it was manufactured, paused, likely checking their position relative where the rover was supposed to be. The robot volunteered its free time on missions like this, which Kim found amusing. Most artificial intelligences were encouraged to cultivate hobbies, but the majority tended to pursue art or collect things rather than engage in the highly active pursuits that October 12 seemed to enjoy.

“What do you think?” Kim asked the robot, trusting his assessment of the terrain more than her GPS’s.

“We are,” there was a short pause, during which static crackled gently over the radio of her walking suit, as the robot considering how accurate a measure of time or distance was appropriate in the conversation, “Slightly off course if the rover’s last known path and elevation were accurately recorded. We should correct to,” another pause, “This way.”

It leaned slightly to the left to indicate direction. Kim peered into the distance where the red haze of the late afternoon made every rock and shadow look like a stalled rover.

The rover itself was far too large to be mistaken for a rock so there was no reason to worry that they’d somehow managed to walk right by it, or so Kim told herself. If the data they had wasn’t accurate or one of them was looking in the wrong direction at the exact moment the search would become far more complicated.

“If you don’t mind my making a general observation,” October 12 spread its four walking limbs to a locked, resting position, so that it could gesture with its manipulator limbs, “The search area is … _big_ … and represents only a small portion of the distance the rover traveled. To walk so far, or roll in the case of the rover is impressive.”

It was amusing to hear October 12 be so deliberately vague when it had a far better sense of scale than any of them, and not just because of the accuracy with which it measured distance and location. In addition to working as an amateur archaeologist October 12 had an interest in the natural wonders of the planet and had recently summited Olympus Mons, a pursuit more popular with robots than humans.

October 12 was right in what it had said as well as what it meant. Few robots, and even fewer people, spent much time outside of the colony domes if they could help it, and as such rarely had any sense of scale of just how large the planet they lived on was. Transmissions and journals from the first settlers talked about the immensity of the task of colonizing the planet and the weight of the accomplishment it represented, but few people nowadays gave much thought to what that meant. Those records had been full of amazement at the vast emptiness around them, which they had filled by naming every field and promontory, often after places from Earth’s history, bringing their home with them.

Now Mars had been permanently colonized for nearly seventy years and to second generation Martians there was little sense of awe when they stared out of the colony domes at the vast open expanses of iron oxide dust, unless a particularly impressive storm was blowing in. Rather they looked back at the wild times on Earth, when there was so much out there that was unknown, and compared the sterile, predictable life on Mars negatively to it. Even Kim couldn’t help feeling a delightful shiver of wonder when she looked at old images from Earth, not just of the natural wonders that abounded there, but of the simple images taken from houses where people lived with windows looking out on wild places. The idea of being able to open up a door and start walking and to keep walking into that wilderness without needing a walking suit to maintain pressure and oxygen to survive was hard to imagine.

It was small wonder that so many people talked wistfully of a time hundreds of years gone with an almost cultural nostalgia.

That nostalgia for the First Age of Exploration that so many people felt was part of the reason Kim and her team were embarking on this particular salvage mission, or rescue mission as Mo, the engineer leading the expedition liked to call it.

Mars had its own rich history, full of wonder and awe, as short as that history was in terms of humans walking its surface. Before humans first set foot on Mars there had been dozens of rovers and of them all _Opportunity_ rover had the best chance of being reactivated or so Mo had told them. His goal was to find the rover and, with the help of some friends of his, get it up and running. ‘Not as a _Curiosity_ ,’ he liked to joke, rather as a ‘living piece of Mars’ history’.

And then October 12 would correct him that the rover was not ‘living’. The robot had an interesting sense of humor, in as much as a robot could have one, mostly revolving around the differences between humans and robots because, as October 12 was fond of explaining, the absurd is inherently humorous.

“Keep your eyes open,” Mo’s voice came over her radio in a general broadcast, “We’re getting close. I don’t want us to walk right by it.”

As though Mo’s comment might make the rover appear Kim squinted into the distance, looking for the arm of Opportunity’s camera that would undoubtedly be sticking high above the rocks around it.

Various affirmations came over the radio, October 12 commenting about its own lack of eyes and inquiring if using the full array of its visual sensors would be sufficient, which got a laugh from Mo. He got the robot’s sense of humor better than most, though he did work with a large number of them in his actual job.

October 12 inclined the secondary sensor array that constituted its head, a leftover concession from back in the early days of robotics when people found them unnerving and tried to make them more relatable by giving them some semblance of recognizable anatomy. Kim had never found robots unnerving and couldn’t understand what all the fuss had been about in the past, but little visual tells were helpful when interacting with them. Right now she assumed that it was talking with Mo.

Kim stared at the horizon where rust red dirt met the dull yellow of the sky. Along the way countless small rocks and boulders dotted the landscape and somewhere among them the _Opportunity_ rover waited. From all the time it had spent alone and exposed the rover was bound to be damaged by the cold and weather, but Mo was hopeful. It wouldn’t be the first rover to be rediscovered and rehabilitated, but it would be the oldest. They just had to find it first.

Somewhere out there in the vast, empty valley was one small rover that had sparked the imaginations of a generation when its three month long mission stretched out for nearly fifteen years, finally ending when the rover was caught in a planet-wide dust storm.

Its last transmission, an update on battery status and light levels had been poetically translated to ‘ _My battery is low and it’s getting dark_ ,’ and had been recorded as such in most of the history texts that Kim had read.

Kim tried to imagine what it would be like to find the rover, seeing it for the first time. What had it been like for wreck divers and their ROVs back on Earth, floating through the gloom, waiting for the remains of a ship to emerge, ghost-like, from the darkness?

From there it was a small step to imagine what it must have been like for the rover, watching as the sky darkened and winds picked up.

Kim had been through her share of storms, including a planet-wide one back when she’d been little. The worst of them had lasted for over a month and had left a lasting impression on her. How could anyone think Mars was safe or tame after staring up at the dome above and, instead of there being ochre sky, seeing only the tumultuous darkness of a raging storm? And that was staring out from the safety of the dome. The rover had been caught in the open, facing the full brunt of the storm.

She shuddered at the thought, knowing that she was being as poetic as the textbook writers had been. _Opportunity_ hadn’t really transmitted such poignant last words. It had merely been a rover, not a thinking robot like October 12 or the drones happily exploring Europa. At the same time, even if it was just a thing, it was a thing that countless people had dedicated years of their lives to, and there was a reason that, not long after the first permanent Martian colony celebrated the first Mars born child, all rovers, defunct and operational, had been declared honorary Martians.

 _Opportunity_ might not have had the capacity to know what the storm closing in on it had meant, but the people behind its mission certainly had.

Kim’s radio crackled on, Samuel’s voice coming over it, breathless with excitement, or perhaps simply exertion as he’d hurried ahead of the rest of the group.

“Does that look…” excited panting, “By you Nikki, you’re closest.”

It was a general broadcast, though Nikki’s reply wasn’t.

“No, look where I’m pointing,” Samuel jumped and waved dramatically.

October 12 reared up onto its hindmost walking limbs, making a general broadcast of its own, “The dimensions and silhouette are within…close enough that there’s nothing else it could be.”

Nikki was turning in circles, trying to see what Samuel and October 12 had.

“There!” Samuel gestured with both arms while Kim tried to figure out what both he and October 12 were pointing at.

In the distance there was a large object, the same rust color as the rocks around it, but too regular in shape to be natural.

Kim adjusted the filter and polarization function of the visor of her walking suit, then the magnification, causing the world to blur for a moment as the lenses refocused.

Though she knew the dimensions of the rover, Kim had gotten so used to the notion of the rover being small and alone, as it was depicted in the history books, that seeing the actual size of it stopped her in her tracks. Compared to the rover October 12 looked positively small and svelte, the contrast growing more obvious as October 12 broke into an undulating trot.

Procedure and professionalism forgotten, Samuel started to run as well, bounding towards the ancient rover, sending up plumes of dust each time his feet hit the ground.

By the time Kim arrived Samuel and October 12 were already brushing dust from the rover’s solar panels and the sensor array held above the body of the rover on a short mast.

Kim winced at the sight of pitted solar panels, the once black and shining material blasted by dust storms until it was a dull, matte gray. They were so badly damaged that saving them was out of the question.

Still, the rest of the rover was in surprisingly good condition given how long it had been exposed to the elements. The people in the past had built their rovers to last, knowing that once they were sent out there would be no repairing them

Nikki arrived and began an animated conversation with Mo, one which Liza, who’d been trailing behind the rest of the group, taking notes on elevation and position, quickly joined in.

Kim knelt down and looked at the rover’s wheels, half buried in the dust that had blown against them. Like October 12 _Opportunity_ was hexapodal, but that was the extent of the similarity. It was also completely unlike the sleek drones that modern explorations used. _Opportunity_ was enormous and crude in a way that all the images of it that she’d seen failed to capture. It was smaller than a skimmer of course, and far less massive than the heavy construction robots that worked tirelessly to build and expand the colony domes, but Opportunity was different. The rover wasn’t beautiful the way modern robots and drones were, it was built for a single purpose, to collect as much data as it could with no thought of retrieval or repair.

It had traveled on its own, across the dust of Mars, when there was nothing waiting for it, no place to go back to when its task was done. Just the rover and Mars.

And people had waited back on Earth, that little bright speck in the sky, impossibly far away.

There were other rovers of course, some of them running at the same time as _Opportunity_ , sent to disparate parts of the planet, their paths never converging.

October 12 was using its secondary sensor array to look at _Opportunity’s_ camera, two vastly different machines meeting eye-to-eye, so to speak, but its main sensor array was trained on her. Robots didn’t get excited the same way people did, though Kim felt that she wasn’t imagining the reverence in October 12’s movements as it examined the rover.

“Cyclopean,” it broadcast to her, as it dropped down alongside her to look at the rover’s wheels.

Kim stared at the robot, wondering if the broadcast had been a mistake, part of some comment made to another member of the team.

October 12 swayed slightly, and tilted its secondary sensor array, “It means massive or crudely constructed, but has connotations of being awe inspiring in those aspects. Archaic terms seem fitting for this.”

“This must mean a lot to you,” Kim said for lack of a better reply, “ _Opportunity_ is a part of your history.”

“A part of our history,” the robot said agreeably, “A large part of our history. A one-point-five by two-point-three by one-point-six meter piece of history weighing approximately one hundred and eighty kilograms.”

The robot seemed pleased with itself for having the chance to use more exact measurements than it usually got the chance to.

“I know,” Kim understood exactly what October 12 meant. They’d all hoped, though they knew logistically it was impossible, that there might be some way that they’d be able to bring _Opportunity_ back themselves. No matter how they might rearrange their gear and supplies there was no way it could fit in the skimmer.

The whole time the goal of their mission was to find the rover and leave a marker beacon at its location so that a second team of salvage and electronics experts could bring the rover to the museum where it would be repaired and showcased.

Smiling, Kim rested a hand on the rover’s side, again marveling at how large the thing was and how they were the first people to come in contact with it since it had left Earth, “You’re one step closer to being home.”

October 12 tilted its secondary sensor array in a negative gesture, “We’re not bringing the rover home.”

Kim started to protest, maybe explain to the robot why what they were doing was so important, what it meant to recover the _Opportunity_ , but October 12 cut her off.

“The rover is home,” October 12 rested one of its manipulator limbs on the rover in an almost tender seeming gesture, “It was made for this place. We’re simply bringing it closer to us.”

The robot lapsed into one of its thoughtful silences, directing not just its secondary sensor array, but most of its main ones as well, upwards.

Above them the sky was a clear hazy yellow. They’d made good time and the sunset wouldn’t set for several more hours, but Kim had the feeling that October 12 was looking towards where Earth was.

 _Opportunity_ had traveled all that distance to come home to the world it had been built for.

Soon, once the repairs were done, _Opportunity_ would once again be broadcasting images back to Earth, scenes of a very different Mars than it had first landed on, and the rover’s journey would continue.


End file.
